From Sarah Palin to Icesave: Google's top 2008 search terms revealed

The Zeitgeist explores the billions of search queries Google receives each year to highlight annual trends in topics like entertainment, politics and sport.

Google said the Zeitgeist tools, which use anonymised, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time, are available all year round.

The unlikely global winner of the fastest rising search term was Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor and the Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee for the US presidential election. Palin came in at number 5 in the UK's list of most searched politicians.

Facebook took top spot as the most popular search term in the UK and iPlayer was the fastest rising.

Google Mail or Gmail did not make it into the top 10 lists for the UK, but Yahoo Mail and Hotmail did.

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